Last night, Fox Movie Channel ran the long-feared-lost sci fi thriller HAND OF DEATH, starring John Agar. I believe this may have been the first-ever TV showing of this film. Here's my verdict....
First off, anyone hoping that Fox was clinging to a pristine print of this film, which had been simply filed away in the vaults, was in for a disappointment. What FMC ran was a clumsily panned and scanned transfer of a dupey, 16 mm print. The sound quality was fuzzy and the picture quality so contrasty that for stretches the monster-Agar was reduced to a silhouette.
Director Gene Nelson and screenwriter Eugene Ling make very little of a fertile idea, unused since The Invisible Ray in 1936. A scientific experiment goes haywire, and scientist Alex Marsh's (John Agar) metabolism is altered so that his mere touch suddenly kills any living creature. The film's first 20 minutes are devoted to bland domestic melodrama and strained comic relief. But the the real problems begin once Agar gains his `hand of death.'
When he gains the death-touch, Alex goes insane. Unfortunately, so does the movie. From that point forward, none of his actions have any coherent motivation, and the picture simply lurches from one ludicrious scene to the next without any apparent logic. When there's no logic, there's also no tension. Puzzled viewers are left to simply watch Agar run amok.
As a result of the accident, Alex also turns black, and eventually morphs into a grotesque, bloated monster that looks like a cross between Uncle Remus and Ben Grimm (The Thing, from the Fantastic Four comic books). Making the scientist turn black gives the film unintented but hilarious additional layers of meaning.
The acting is wooden, but the characters are so poorly sketched that it matters little. Agar has very little to do here except run around in an oversized foam rubber mask and grunt. The film is further weakened by a juvenile score (which, at one point, breaks into `Chopsticks!').
Nelson worked mostly in television, where he shot an episode of the original Star Trek series (`The Gamesters of Triskelion'), among other TV episodes. At just 58 minutes, Hand of Death isn't much longer than `Gamesters of Triskelion.' This appears to have been Ling's final screenwriting credit. Perhaps after this, he was too embarrassed to continue.
The most distinguished member of the Hand of Death crew was cinematoprapher Floyd Crosby. Crosby (father of singer David Crosby) had lensed major Hollywood features including the stunning High Noon (1952), but was blacklisted by the major studios and reduced to shooting B pictures (including Attack of the Crab Monsters and Teenage Cave Man). After Hand of Death, Crosby would shoot most of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations, as well as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Black Zoo, among other genre favorites. It's impossible to judge his work here, due to the poor quality of the FMC print.
Hand of Death is not a good film, but manages to hold audiences' attention in the same `I-can't-believe-I'm-seeing-this' sort of way that films like The Hideous Sun Demon amuse audiences. It was not a major rediscovery by any means, but it was nice to finally see this little curio.
First off, anyone hoping that Fox was clinging to a pristine print of this film, which had been simply filed away in the vaults, was in for a disappointment. What FMC ran was a clumsily panned and scanned transfer of a dupey, 16 mm print. The sound quality was fuzzy and the picture quality so contrasty that for stretches the monster-Agar was reduced to a silhouette.
Director Gene Nelson and screenwriter Eugene Ling make very little of a fertile idea, unused since The Invisible Ray in 1936. A scientific experiment goes haywire, and scientist Alex Marsh's (John Agar) metabolism is altered so that his mere touch suddenly kills any living creature. The film's first 20 minutes are devoted to bland domestic melodrama and strained comic relief. But the the real problems begin once Agar gains his `hand of death.'
When he gains the death-touch, Alex goes insane. Unfortunately, so does the movie. From that point forward, none of his actions have any coherent motivation, and the picture simply lurches from one ludicrious scene to the next without any apparent logic. When there's no logic, there's also no tension. Puzzled viewers are left to simply watch Agar run amok.
As a result of the accident, Alex also turns black, and eventually morphs into a grotesque, bloated monster that looks like a cross between Uncle Remus and Ben Grimm (The Thing, from the Fantastic Four comic books). Making the scientist turn black gives the film unintented but hilarious additional layers of meaning.
The acting is wooden, but the characters are so poorly sketched that it matters little. Agar has very little to do here except run around in an oversized foam rubber mask and grunt. The film is further weakened by a juvenile score (which, at one point, breaks into `Chopsticks!').
Nelson worked mostly in television, where he shot an episode of the original Star Trek series (`The Gamesters of Triskelion'), among other TV episodes. At just 58 minutes, Hand of Death isn't much longer than `Gamesters of Triskelion.' This appears to have been Ling's final screenwriting credit. Perhaps after this, he was too embarrassed to continue.
The most distinguished member of the Hand of Death crew was cinematoprapher Floyd Crosby. Crosby (father of singer David Crosby) had lensed major Hollywood features including the stunning High Noon (1952), but was blacklisted by the major studios and reduced to shooting B pictures (including Attack of the Crab Monsters and Teenage Cave Man). After Hand of Death, Crosby would shoot most of the Roger Corman Poe adaptations, as well as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Black Zoo, among other genre favorites. It's impossible to judge his work here, due to the poor quality of the FMC print.
Hand of Death is not a good film, but manages to hold audiences' attention in the same `I-can't-believe-I'm-seeing-this' sort of way that films like The Hideous Sun Demon amuse audiences. It was not a major rediscovery by any means, but it was nice to finally see this little curio.